Two Open Doors in a Field

Sophie Klahr’s second collection is so confidently crafted that the momentum of her poems carries the reader. Two Open Doors in a Field shuttles between Nebraska and California, forming a seamless warp and weft that shape the book without corseting it.

The only interiors in these poems are motel rooms and the inside of a car nicknamed Crystal. A wind is everywhere. The poet’s attention to detail makes the forgettable sacred: “boots already wet from dew.” Each word is unshowy but carefully chosen to carry intense, restrained feeling, as in “Driving through Idaho, Listening to the Radio,” which concludes:

The story of how gambling becomes ad-
   diction—loss-rush—one more night at The Red
Garter or Clearwater—familiar as
leaning bent against the pilled white bedspread,
my mouth saying Hit me. Hit me again.

In the riveting sequence “Like Nebraska,” each poem begins with a simile but feels wholly different:

He sleeps like an amber thread […]
She rustles like a stream […]
He unfolds like a lunar eclipse […]
She shifts like the word caliper […]
He rises like a gamble taken […]
She breathes like a river […]

In a crown of sonnets titled “Pass with Care,” the lines swish as they pass one another, lending the sequence great dynamism. See, for instance, this ending and beginning:

[…] white Jewish sober queer
Woman seeing America O—I
met my five-year-old trans cousin last week—
He knew himself so well it made me weep
~
(He knew himself so well it made me weep
    or was it me that I was weeping for)

Klahr lets the reader feel the energy of co-creating these poems. In the front seat, the steering wheel is near enough to feel as if you’re part of the driver’s decisions, though you haven’t moved a muscle.